‘Stutter’ Is Not Just For The Birds

Prof traces speech impediment through history and culture

In his latest book, “Stutter,” Babbit Professor of Comparative
Literature and Professor of English Marc Shell explores a topic close
to home.

He has struggled with stuttering his whole life, and in this
work, he approaches his subject from almost every conceivable angle.
Shell, who spoke with The Crimson, illuminates stuttering’s medical, linguistic, cross-cultural,
comedic, biblical, zoological, poetic, and political facets, to name a
few.

He presents wide-ranging and interesting facts—for instance,
stutterers make up just under one percent of the world’s population.

Some, like Henry James, find it easier to speak fluently in a
non-native tongue, and others, when they sing, are as clear as birds.

A number of birds, however, including approximately seven percent of the zebra finch population, actually do stutter.

And that’s not even mentioning cartoon animals like Porky Pig,
whose comedic stammering, though perhaps politically incorrect, is
scientifically sound. Shell finds that the logic of Porky’s jokes
follows a human stutterer’s efforts to achieve fluidity.

A more Kosher segment of the book deals with Moses, perhaps
the world’s most famous stammerer. Shell notes that Moses experienced
outbursts of rage common to frustrated stutterers—the breaking of the
first set of commandments may have been one such incident.

All kinds of linguistic doublings, word repetitions, and origins open new analytical possibilities.

In a particularly elegant passage, Shell explicates how the
concepts of “barbarian” (meaning ‘a person who does not speak our
language’) and “stutterer” (indicating ‘a person who does not speak our
language our way’) converged in the hexametrical proclamation of the
Visigoth Aleric as he stood outside the gates of Rome.

It’s moments like these when Shell’s scholarship shines—where
seemingly disparate linguistic and cultural arguments converge in a
delightful illustration of interconnectedness.

In other passages, however, the connections seem a bit more tenuous.

In his section about Hamlet’s stutter-like habits of
repetition, punning, and word substitution, Shell makes the (perhaps
unavoidable) play on Hamlet being a “little ham” akin to Porky Pig.

And sometimes the arguments become so technical on a linguistic level that one becomes lost in jargon.

Though Shell does not discuss intersections between art and
economics in “Stutter,” which he has addressed in previous works, he
does return to other pet subjects. One chapter is titled “Animals that
Talk,” a topic he teaches in an English seminar.

Similarly, analysis about the links between verbal and
physical stumbling leads Shell to discuss polio, from which he also
suffered as a child and has previously examined in an equally
interdisiplinary book.

While “Stutter” has a concluding chapter, it seems as though
Shell deliberately ends with the same “lack of closure” stutterers
often suffer.

One is left with an impression more than a conclusion:
stuttering is more than a speech condition—it is a complex phenomenon
that influences culture in ways Shell has only begun to elucidate.